IguanaBowtie
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User ID: 946
IguanaBowtie
1mo ago
I read Scott's piece as about as Straussian as he ever gets.
He lays out a long and detailed takedown of the Democrat Industrial Complex, then adds a relatively wishy-washy 'but Trump does these bad things too'. I don't think he's a secret MAGA by any stretch, but I do think that Scott has come a long way from his railing against feminism days & not because he ever had a 'come to Jesus' moment - he's just very politically canny now, and cares about what happens to his (grey) tribe. My guess is that he's predicting a Trump victory and wants to avoid himself, his family and his tribe from being targeted by anti-Trump backlash, living as they do in the heart of Blue culture. Again, I don't want to accuse Scott of dishonesty as I think he's a top 1% scrupulosity person - I think he won't be voting for Trump and doesn't particularly like the guy. I just think that the piece should be read with an eye for realpolitik.
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
I think it 'indiscriminate' is a curious word here.
It's not the targeting of Hezbollah but the method that is indiscriminate. If you can't see your target and you detonate an explosive device, you've probably committed a warcrime - you can't be sure you didn't blow up a pager in the pocket of a terror cell member currently working his day job as a bus driver, or while he was pumping gas at a crowded station, or carrying his 10yr old daughter on the hip directly over the pager. It's a lot less indiscriminate than peppering an area with antipersonnel mines, and quite a big improvement over bombing houses in civilian neighborhoods* but it's still bad.
*even though the latter is explicitly not a warcrime if the enemy has stationed military assets and personnel among the civilians - or rather, the warcrime was committed by the other side by using human shields. So why are the pagers no good if blowing up suburbia is ok? You don't know where the former is going to go off, and you need to know. A bomb you can aim, though the collateral damage may be horrible it is something you can estimate. You can choose not to bomb a school, or a hospital, at the very least without 'knocking' first. When you fire blind, you're saying that the worst possible outcome is acceptable, and IMO that's a bright moral line in the sand that should never be crossed. **
**And yeah, Hezbollah and Hamas and their like go there all as a matter of course, which is precisely why I'm fine with blowing them to pieces in a discriminate fashion.
IguanaBowtie
3mo ago
I'm quite whitepilled on this particular issue. In no particular order,
-This is definitely a cultural evolution issue. It will sort itself out, and not by 'replacement by the Amish' - high TFR subcultures will emerge from every group, and the ones that are also highly functional (eg, not the Amish/Hasidics/islamists) will dominate. You need to be isolated, limited in total population and insular to commit cultural suicide via celibacy and our culture is none of those. This is actually nothing to be too excited about, low TFR is a much less pressing problem than Malthusian collapse and I'm not eager to jump back on that heading.
-I'm very much not afraid of the developing world. I'm afraid for them, but probably their TFR drops fast enough that populations level out before coming to a very unpleasant head. Immigration is somewhat more complicated, but I think it is likewise self-correcting: pretty soon developing countries are going to have less surplus people and start seeing foreign poaching of their most able young people as the beggar-thy-neighbor strategy that it is. As usual this will be mostly bad for the people in developing countries (exit restrictions are bad) instead of us.
-There's definitely an element of 'making babies is extremely hard for women' that is understandable and understated. This can be broken down into 'pregnancy and childbirth suck', 'children are hard' - both are solvable!
Artificial wombs could exist quickly if there was political will for their development. Lacking them, the state could subsidize surrogacy (or outright fund it themselves), while building infrastructure for and normalizing same. Nations have experimented with communal child rearing (orphanages, kibbutzim) and the outcomes tend to be worse than nuclear families, but this seems solvable too. I'm especially bullish on AI taking a big role in this regard - even if a cold machine can never show a mother's love (#doubt), it can definitely take a big role in the baseline supervision role that parents spend a huge chunk of their time on, and be better at it too. (eg - kids at the park are much safer with an AI drone keeping ceaseless watch on them than with a parent glancing up from their phone every five minutes) Then you can focus on getting humans to provide the active nurturing - the actual fun part of parenting!
-Maybe this leads to us becoming very different that we currently are - more hedonistic, even less in touch with nature (eg: meat comes from the store), less responsible for the powerless in our care. But the same is true for every technology to some degree - suffering builds character, but we're still pretty happy about eradicating polio. Future humans aren't going to be shackled to my values, whether I like it or not, and this doesn't seem like an unreasonably dystopian outcome, especially compared to the other likely options.
-TFR is cratering just as longevity technology seems to be taking off. This is a happy coincidence!
-technological singularity more generally obviating any problem that only really gets bad 20/50/100 years from now
IguanaBowtie
9mo ago
Jared and Ivanka shouldn't hold their breath, but the progressive left is far from safe. There aren't just two choices here, and the most likely outcome IMO is 'Zionist American Jews use their (non-unique but considerable) political influence to get the loudly antizionist faction expelled from the Dem coalition'.
Now, this is a harder proposition today than it was 20 years ago. It risks splitting the party along age lines, while Republicans laugh from the sidelines - but it doesn't guarantee electoral irrelevance like some worry. Plenty of democratic states have a split left and the far left is almost always the smaller group, has nowhere to go politically, and ends up as the mostly irrelevant junior partner. (here in Canada we have had a united right and split left for decades, the Libs just treat the NDP like their annoying kid brother and it mostly works) An increasingly large and motivated far left makes the proposition more dicey, but the far left's critical weakness has and continues to be lack of strategy - they depend a lot on 'being on the right side of history' carrying them across the finish line - so I expect them to continue to punch below their weight in internecine disputes.
IguanaBowtie
11mo ago
AFACIT the monoculture is unaware of the existence of the Black Hebrew Israelites & puts them down to some sort of right-wing psyop when and if they sneak into the national conciousness. It's sinful to notice them, so people don't.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
The problem with this is that The Mellowing that comes from constructive interaction with capitalism is dependent on actually being able to interact with capitalism. The average banlieue resident doesnt have much to offer in the French marketplace, and even their unskilled labor is mostly devalued and surplus. I dont see this situation improving, either.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Add this one to the realignment pile. Twitch presumably unbanned the nipples due to progressive pressure. (SWERFism ist verboten) And then got BTFO by payment processors, who for reasons I don't fully understand are absolutely dedicated white knights of online prudishness, to such an extent that much of the payment for online porn has been delegated to the Romanian mafia.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Without reading other comments: It's mostly just a snarl word like 'sheeple' that gets thrown at people with a high degree of social conformity, specifically conformity to the rules a tribe that the snarl-er doesn't particularly like. 'Our partisans are loyal and incorruptible, their partisans are brainwashed and radicalized', etc. If there's something useful to the term, its that some tribes and ideologies really do put outsized importance on loyalty and ideological purity, with cults being at the far end of the spectrum and generally recognized as a bad thing. But calling someone an NPC (or a cultist) only turns up the heat, which is seldom useful but particularly bad here as everyone's close-minded and defensive while participating in a flame war, which gives the actual zealots cover.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Blue Ape together strong
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Real question, why do construction bosses prefer Jose to Bubba? Common non-class-associated Hispanic name vs highly lower-class associated white name?
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Such men must not be seen as losers and washouts, crawling in shame away from a life of failure and grasping tightly a pathetic consolation prize. It must be seen as a noble and important life path, every bit as valid as the warrior’s role, and genuinely rewarding in and of itself rather than simply an escape from suffering.
Could you elaborate on why you feel this is the case? IMO it would be nice, but people who are looking at dropping out of society are likely already low-status, becoming marginally more contemptible isn't a deal-breaker if, as part of the bargain, going forward you get to largely disregard outside social pressure.
The only danger I can think of is irritating the majority enough that they destroy you. In the west, violent pogroms against 'incel cults' are concievable but not very likely. Some form of lawfare might be more practical, but I'm not really seeing a big risk, people walk away all the time and mainstream society is largely indifferent unless they start causing a ruckus.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Agreed, except to note that there's no need for aliens to be hiding in the Oort cloud - mobile and under the ocean somewhere would likely do just fine, along with a number of other close-to-home alternatives. And that the absence of observed radio signals can be explained as well by 'there are superior options for interstellar communication and aliens use those' as 'there are no aliens sending signals'.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Even though I lately try hard to believe people when they make claims about their motivations & internal experience, I think you're definitely onto something. Though perhaps a more charitable (if banal) take might be less 'you dont really believe that' and more ' "I believe X" captures a really wide range of intuitions, mental states and devotional intensity'. And we probably preserve some of that ambiguity more or less intentionally - I imagine piety-measuring contests are some of the least productive uses of human effort yet discovered.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I would like to suggest an alternate theme here - that instead of a monolithic antiwhite hostility being the driving force behind these tropes, there's a great-replacement-adjacent but ultimately pro-western eregore flexing its wings. The idea is indeed that whites are on their way out, but instead of relishing their fall, that western institutions should be reformed and redeemed in order to be inherited by new generations of nonwhite successors. The inheritence bit being the crucial point - don't burn it all down! Dont cut off your civilizational nose to spite its current white face! And most importantly, leave the institutions standing so that the current owners (with their newly minted diversity credentials) are not displaced.
The undisputed champion of this trope must be Lin Manuel Miranda. Within 30 seconds of learning about Hamilton, I thought 'damn, they really want young nonwhites to buy into this America thing, guess they're getting spooked about who's going to fund their pensions'.
Elsewhere, Moana has the hypermasculine but clownish Maui revealed to be the direct cause of all the world's problems; his atonement is a footnote to the story of the female protagonist mastering all of his skills, using them (along with her innate goodness and wisdom) to repair the damage he foolishly caused, and then passing those skills on to her people so they can reclaim their rightful place in the world.
Encanto, meanwhile, deals with class conflict and the divine right of aristocracy. After some central-american revolutionary-types (for no reason at all) purge their village, a mysterious gift is granted to the family matriarch that separates her family from the common people, both in terms of giving them exceptional abilities* and also a really nice house where they don't have to do most of the chores. But that's ok, because they will selflessly devote their abilities to the good of the people, who will be loyal and devoted in return - which is only fair, as 'they have no gifts but they are many'. And ultimately, the matriarch's gift is be passed down to her granddaughter so the system may be perpetuated.
Naraburns has a good post downthread about Gran Turino having a similar arc. I think a lot of the "The Future is Female/lgbt/nonwhite' media can be taken in this light, not exactly as a condemnation of western culture but as a plea to preserve it, in spite of the flaws of its creators.
*There's a whole cast of east-coast upper-class tropes: the motherly doctor, the beautiful socialite, the perceptive journalist, the workaholic who carries donkeys around (not too much of a stretch to be a business executive)... and how could we forget, the brilliant but tormented visionary who really always wanted to be an actor. Oh Lin Manuel, you scamp.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I don't really see it as a 'better minimum deal', just greater male variability plus society reacting reasonably to that reality. If by 'minimum deal' you mean something like 'average outcomes of the worst 10% by outcome' then yeah, men get a super raw deal. But the top 10% of men blow the top 10% of women out of the water (biggest thing driving the culture war bar none imo) and the average man is probably right about parity with the average woman, and possibly married to her.
IMO, the big factor that makes this notably worse for men is that the disutility of very bad outcomes greatly outweighs the utility of very good ones, at least at the individual level. While society probably derives greater benefits from great geniuses than it suffers harm from killers and predators, if I were to live at the 50th percentile of American outcomes and you presented me with a coin flip to move either to the 40th or 60th percentiles, I might consider it, but wouldnt go near any proposition involving a coin flip between the 10th and 90th percentiles, or worse, between the 1st and 99th percentiles. Evolutionary pressure forces men broadly to make that tradeoff, since 'maximizing evolutionary fitness' and 'maximizing individual utility' are only passing acquaintances. But, in modern society, with fairly high utility payoffs available from middling outcomes, the tradeoff seems like a really bad one.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I'll happily admit that my two suggestions are awful, but I know they would work and I'm not sure that's the case with your proposals.
Test either two parents and a kid, or two kids and a parent.
Assuming we know we're creamskimming from a population with significantly worse outcomes on average than our own, this sample size isn't big enough to be relevant in figuring out if the family is from a good-outcomes subgroup (assuming such groups meaningfully exist) or if they're outliers who got lucky and had a kid that didn't regress to the mean too much. If it's the latter, you're going to be having problems in 5-15 years and not 60-90, as France is finding out right now.
That said, it does hint at an interesting solution where immigration authorites could do careful geneological work and data analysis on potential immigrants, to connect the relevant educational attainment and available testing results across large populations, to try to identify these high-performance subgroups. But again, though less horrible than my original suggestions, it still smacks far too much of eugenics ('racial credit scores'?) to be seriously considered. As opposed to quietly raising barriers to immigration from certain countries while easing them from others.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Perhaps not Harvard material, but are you really feeling that there are 'lots' ( 5? 50? a double-digit percentage?) of highschools where the year's most academically successful graduate is not among the approximately 50% of Americans able to eventually navigate some form of post-secondary education? I know some districts are pretty rough but 'their top 1% is worse than our median' is a heck of a claim.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
Sure, depending on how you define the subgroup, but if you can figure out a good category-marker that isolates a population with consistent differences in outcomes or measurable cognitive ability, go for it. You might end up cleaving along cultural lines rather than genetic, but if it reproduces in the new environment it's all good.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I don't know the answer to this, but suspect that it's something horribly short-termist, like goosing projected GDP numbers to placate the analysts & keep interest rates low until the next election.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I think the relevant pro-HBD point here is reversion to the mean; you really should care about what the 'pool' of people you're drawing from looks like, because you'll soon have a new generation that looks as much like them as the parents you cherry-picked.
I guess you can get around this if you're willing to make sterilization a condition of immigration, or deport that portion of the 2nd+ generations who fail to meet your standards, either way committing to perpetually top up your country's population by cream-skimming the developing world. (holy dysgenics, Batman!) But I think either would be generally considered far worse than just prioritizing high-performing immigrant groups along racial lines.
Also not a problem if you reject group intelligence differences, of course, which is the official and default stance.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
I know this forum is more focused on a specific cohort (intelligent, financially successful, often romantically not so much) but I'm approaching this issue from a different angle - a family member who is a classic disabled NEET in his early 30s. Near the bottom of the desirability totem pole, the question of 'fold' vs 'improve' has to contend with the latter having a very significant chance of being very costly in rime & effort and bearing absolutely zero fruit. This is where a lot of 'resent' cases come from, (though not all) but luckily that doesnt seem to be a major factor for now.
The question in these cases is, at what point is it rational to cut one's losses?
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
If I were the university, I'd be most worried about whistleblower complaints leading to embarrassing discovery reveals. That new admissions hire with sterling SJ credentials, who talks the lingo fluently? How sure are you that she/they aren't a plant from some right-wing org looking for a big payday? What about the handful of white men still working in those roles, can they be trusted? Progressive ideology plus institutional inertia will definitely incline schools towards noncompliance with the new regime, but Ivies sitting on multibillion endowments are a big fat target, and a single lawsuit can change the tune of the board of trustees in a hurry, even if their school wasn't in the crosshairs this time.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
One hopes, but the ability of existing interests to simply fund them as propaganda organs means they'll probably persist quite a while past their natural expiry date, even if their readership drops away to basically nil.
IguanaBowtie
1yr ago
But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard. The school itself does, in partnership with its prospective students and their potential future employers. They all follow their local incentives
Students: go to the school that impresses the most employers, and at higher levels allows for the best networking opportunities, which in both cases is usually the highest status school that will have you (gaining some skills is a nice bonus)
Employers: hire students from the schools that filter for the cream of the crop (having them get a general education is a nice bonus)
School: keep your audience happy by being selective in admissions, scrubbing out fakers, and statusmaxxing in other ways to pull ahead of your competitors
If there were an Education Tsar (a real one) then maximizing social utility from the process might be a priority. As it is, we have an elaborate workaround to the fact that hiring based on IQ tests is illegal.
From https://archive.is/QMpmd#selection-1045.452-1045.744
Bailey: Lots of critical theory about representation. Motte: Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad
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